POP POP goes the culture

Growing up in “a noisy East Vancouver house where there were never enough bathrooms, privacy, or salt and vinegar chips to go around,” Jen Sookfong Lee, the youngest of five daughters, was born to parents for whom immigration from China was a recent memory. The whole family turned to popular culture—“the soap operas, the fashion magazines, the celebrity gossip, and the hockey fandom”—to find a way into white culture. Even her grandfather, who lived with them (and who had paid the $500 head tax in 1913 when he immigrated) listened to CBC radio all day long. Lee’s father listened to Chuck Berry, and her mother, who came from Hong Kong, learned to bake “the perfect sponge cake.” Losing her father before she turned 12 years of age, Lee felt like an orphan and turned to reading Anne of Green Gables and all Lucy Maud Montgomery’s other books. Feeling the pressure to be “the good girl,” Lee fell in love with Princess Diana the day she married Prince Charles in 1981 and millions watched the wedding on TV, including five-year-old Lee. As she grew older though, Lee realized that Diana had not always been perfect and that neither was she. Lee also learned how white privilege made it easier for some people and difficult for racialized people like her. Pop culture in the Western world betrayed her, as she describes in her memoir, Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart (M&S $24.95). Yet she admits her relationship with pop culture will always remain, that it is how she cobbles together her own “identities and memberships from the cultural storm.”

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